Madam How and Lady Why | Page 7

it is not half made yet. One thing we shall see at once, and see it
more and more clearly the older we grow; I mean her wonderful
patience and diligence. Madam How is never idle for an instant.
Nothing is too great or too small for her; and she keeps her work before
her eye in the same moment, and makes every separate bit of it help
every other bit. She will keep the sun and stars in order, while she looks
after poor old Mrs. Daddy- long-legs there and her eggs. She will spend
thousands of years in building up a mountain, and thousands of years in
grinding it down again; and then carefully polish every grain of sand
which falls from that mountain, and put it in its right place, where it
will be wanted thousands of years hence; and she will take just as much
trouble about that one grain of sand as she did about the whole
mountain. She will settle the exact place where Mrs. Daddy- long-legs
shall lay her eggs, at the very same time that she is settling what shall
happen hundreds of years hence in a stair millions of miles away. And I
really believe that Madam How knows her work so thoroughly, that the
grain of sand which sticks now to your shoe, and the weight of Mrs.
Daddy-long-legs' eggs at the bottom of her hole, will have an effect
upon suns and stars ages after you and I are dead and gone. Most
patient indeed is Madam How. She does not mind the least seeing her
own work destroyed; she knows that it must be destroyed. There is a
spell upon her, and a fate, that everything she makes she must unmake

again: and yet, good and wise woman as she is, she never frets, nor tires,
nor fudges her work, as we say at school. She takes just as much pains
to make an acorn as to make a peach. She takes just as much pains
about the acorn which the pig eats, as about the acorn which will grow
into a tall oak, and help to build a great ship. She took just as much
pains, again, about the acorn which you crushed under your foot just
now, and which you fancy will never come to anything. Madam How is
wiser than that. She knows that it will come to something. She will find
some use for it, as she finds a use for everything. That acorn which you
crushed will turn into mould, and that mould will go to feed the roots of
some plant, perhaps next year, if it lies where it is; or perhaps it will be
washed into the brook, and then into the river, and go down to the sea,
and will feed the roots of some plant in some new continent ages and
ages hence: and so Madam How will have her own again. You dropped
your stick into the river yesterday, and it floated away. You were sorry,
because it had cost you a great deal of trouble to cut it, and peel it, and
carve a head and your name on it. Madam How was not sorry, though
she had taken a great deal more trouble with that stick than ever you
had taken. She had been three years making that stick, out of many
things, sunbeams among the rest. But when it fell into the river, Madam
How knew that she should not lose her sunbeams nor anything else: the
stick would float down the river, and on into the sea; and there, when it
got heavy with the salt water, it would sink, and lodge, and be buried,
and perhaps ages hence turn into coal; and ages after that some one
would dig it up and burn it, and then out would come, as bright warm
flame, all the sunbeams that were stored away in that stick: and so
Madam How would have her own again. And if that should not be the
fate of your stick, still something else will happen to it just as useful in
the long run; for Madam How never loses anything, but uses up all her
scraps and odds and ends somehow, somewhere, somewhen, as is fit
and proper for the Housekeeper of the whole Universe. Indeed, Madam
How is so patient that some people fancy her stupid, and think that,
because she does not fall into a passion every time you steal her sweets,
or break her crockery, or disarrange her furniture, therefore she does
not care. But I advise you as a little boy, and still more when you grow
up to be a man, not to get that fancy into your head; for you will find
that, however good-natured